
[Sandorf Passage; 2025]
Tr. from the Croatian by Ena Selimović
Bringing up her mother’s refusal to buy her one, the narrator and main protagonist of Underground Barbie calls the eponymous doll a “sliver of plastic perfection.” This sentiment grounds the action and narrative in this mesmerizing book. First published as Sloboština Barbie in Croatian in 2008, Maša Kolanović’s landmark novel is now available in an English translation by Ena Selimović. The narrative follows the everyday, almost mundane, lives of young children during the tumultuous era of the Yugoslav Wars as Yugoslavia broke into six independent states. Written from the perspective of a precocious girl, the has been illustrated likewise with childish sketches. Even as the protagonist recounts how she got her Barbies and narrates the make-believe games she and her friends played with them, a Croatia on the cusp of change indirectly takes shape in bits and pieces.
Ranka Primorac, in a 2008 review for The Guardian, said that the Barbie adventures “embody the progress of the war and poke fun at patriarchal and nationalist excesses of each antagonistic side.” This is of course enabled by the voice of the young protagonist whose age plays an important role in what is highlighted and how when it comes to events taking place in the country. In the first chapter, she narrates how daily life has been completely altered: “[W]e were no longer allowed to call our teachers “Comrade!” Everything was repackaged. Including the word “comrade,” which was folded into “Mister” and “Miss.” Later, she recounts: “All the little Yugo cars lost their Ys, while Converse hightops gained a Croatian checkerboard taped over the star. We stopped swearing on our honor by Tito’s ‘little key’ (whatever that was) and dropped the Communist Partisan Rade Končar star trick from our jump-rope routines.” In another chapter, the children put together a fake news program by editing a radio statement from the Serb Diplomatic Party’s leader and then adding absurd questions of their own, turning it into a farcical interview. For a novel set during debilitating times, Underground Barbie is frequently quite funny. The seriousness is masterfully cut, and paradoxically intensified, by the antics of the children and the scenarios they dream up.
For the adults, the war means sirens, raids, the looming sense of panic and danger, the chaotic takeover of the present. For the children, or at least those at the center of this novel, it is a time of freedom from school, from extracurricular classes, from responsibilities. They fly under the radar of distracted adults and play to their heart’s content, seeing it as a rare time for fun without any encroachments on their space, whether by other humans or reality. As her parents prep for an imminent disaster, the protagonist is getting ready in her own way: “In my little Smurfs suitcase, I packed away my most prized portable property, the most important heirlooms I wanted by my side if the world ended. . . . Leaving Barbie at the mercy of the shelling would have been a reckless gamble.” It is this suitcase she lugs to the emergency shelter in the basement and back whenever the sirens go off, at times even playing out of it due to the frequency of these trips.
“In anthropological terms,” says Kolanović in an interview, “dolls are a perfect reduction of ourselves. They are humanlike, and yet in our hands they are easily manipulated. When we play with dolls, we seem to have control over them, we breathe life into them, we create them in our image, our likeness.” According to the author, the Mattel Barbie had an unmatched “aura” that made it the object of longing for children across Yugoslavia before the advent of senseless consumerism and free-market capitalism as a result of opening up the economy post-Independence.
When it comes to collecting Barbies, there can never be enough. The catalogues and advertisements also rely on this manufactured desire that drives the growing protagonist. At one point, she asserts, “I mean, what was Barbie without her abundance of flawless belongings? She would be reduced to the plainest peasant girl from the Handicrafts Store. . . . [D]welling on excess in Barbie World was itself excessive, because no one—no one—in this world could have an excess of anything from Barbie World. A shortage—yes! A shortage always.” The continued proliferation of plastic, as dolls and accessories accumulate, is a meaning-making exercise, a distraction that enables the protagonist to dissociate from what’s happening around her: “Should our building be struck by a bomb and reduced to ashes, spewing flames and black smoke, life would still be worth living if my Barbie remained whole.”
The neighborhood where the characters live is called Sloboština and, representative of “New Zagreb,” it was a socialist project that aimed to provide adequate housing to individuals and families across the socio-economic spectrum. As a result, according to Maša Kolanović, her novel has “children from working families, children of intellectuals, children whose parents came from other parts of Yugoslavia with traces of their regions, children who are ‘different’ and consequently cast off.” Their locality and its surroundings are a treasure trove of possibility, and anything holds the potential to be a stage or a playground. They play with Barbies in the basement, on the raised sewage vent in front of the building, the little park behind it, the building’s stairwell, on the rug of any of the children’s rooms, as well as in the derelict land between Sloboština and the next neighborhood. While Barbie brings the children together for some time, there is still preferential treatment for the haves and have nots when it comes to possessing the dolls and their accessories.
Mattel’s Barbie is not the only Western import that defines the life of the protagonist. Television becomes a portal into another world, a brief respite from the upheaval and tumult taking over the country. The novel’s very first paragraph invokes Tom Cruise and Top Gun as it compares the planes of the Yugoslav People’s Army zooming overhead to a sterile airshow. The main character’s first Barbie is Crystal Barbie, immediately conjuring Krystle Carrington from Dynasty (an ’80s US soap opera), while another one of her playmates’ blond Ken is modeled after Hollywood actor Robert Redford. Watching Twin Peaks together is a family activity, and the very last episode of the show is interrupted by emergency broadcasts as they wait to finally discover Laura’s killer. A ball, originally a Barbie refugee ball and later turned into a ball for refugees, takes the form of Eurovision auditions.
While the eponymous Barbies are of course the prominent characters and linchpins of these make-believe scenarios, it is Kajfeš who steals the limelight time and again, becoming a deuteragonist by the end of the novel. Owned by Svjetlana and named for the anti-snoring aid shown in commercials, he was “the most abhorrent Ken you could ever come across.” When he is first introduced, the protagonist paints a vivid descriptive portrait: “He wasn’t of the Mattel race but made of an atrocious plastic that looked burnt, though he wasn’t a Black Ken. And the cherry on top? One of his eyes was peeling off, and the fingers of his right hand were wrecked ever since Svjetlana’s cousin Marijana had gnawed through them during one of her visits.” This ordeal affects the doll’s potential:
Something had broken in our Svjetlana, and for a very long time no one could even begin to fathom what it was. Her Ken—for the record, he was a fake Ken even before the terrible incident—had now become an irreparable catastrophe, and it was on her initiative that he transformed into “Dr. Kajfeš.” With that, he became thoroughly disturbed and sexually wayward. But let me be frank: regardless of the extent to which this development interfered with our gameplay and made us want to strangle Svjetlana, our Barbies somehow, and only under certain circumstances, secretly reveled in this newly forged and oddly sexy identity that Dr. Kajfeš introduced to the game with all his shenanigans, sexual abuses, and overindulgences.
His battered condition is often at the center of the scenarios, almost as if the girls take his depravities to be the “natural” result of his deformities. Dr. Kajfeš flits between Hugo’s Quasimodo, Leroux’s Erik, and Shelley’s Creature depending on the part(s) he plays. He shifts from being sad and deserving of sympathy to a villain of the highest order at the drop of a beat as per the whims of the children spinning out these stories. Kajfeš comes to represent the children’s uptake of racial thinking. While enacting Miami Vice with Dea’s Ken, they cast him as the Black cop. In another instance, when told to “Beat it, perv” by some Barbies he is troubling, Kajfeš starts to moonwalk while singing Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” He has an ambiguous racial identity, dark and disfigured but still not a Black Ken: “That was what Kajfeš, with his fake-plastic dark complexion, truly was: the Michael Jackson of this small underground world, stuck somewhere in the process of becoming White. Neither here nor there, neither White nor Black, just like the mixed halves of Kinder Lada.”
Kinder Lada was a special spread exclusively marketed by Kinder for the Yugoslavian market that does not exist anymore. It was a sweet, two-colored—brown hazelnut on one side and cream white chocolate with a stark divide—concoction sold in jars. As such, Dr. Kajfeš is a liminal figure existing neither here or there, due to a mixture of his shoddy provenance and subsequent mutilation. He is not Black, but Black, and never White. While Dea’s Ken, authentically Mattel and respectably White, occasionally joins him in his shenanigans, he never crosses the limits of social acceptability. Kajfeš wants to be taken as seriously as the “real” Ken—to be the hero of Barbie World, to be the main love interest of Barbie—but he never can, frozen in his aspirations. His antics are a way to command attention through shock and distaste as much as they are a reflection of his twisted personality.
Kajfeš’s villainy usually involves sexual harassment and abuse of the most disturbing kind, played out in a way as if nothing could be more ordinary: “[H]e loved to jump into the Barbies’ bed uninvited, try on their clothes, whisper vulgar peasant jokes straight into their ears, mount his head on a Barbie’s body, or snore loudly.” This snoring was just to catch the Barbie off-guard after which “he would brutally rape her five times before she could say ‘cakes.’” This is not an isolated incident. In another chapter, he attempts “war rape” while posing as a peacekeeper and barging in on the conversation of a group of Barbies. Dr. Kajfeš’s sexual proclivities seem to be implicitly mapped on to his “racial” identity. He is a rogue who does not know when to stop and always takes it too far. His seediness appears as a manifestation of his otherness and is to be tolerated by children and their Barbies alike. While it might seem that the sexual violence is trivialized, there is a dark undercurrent to the games that flows far beyond Barbie World and into real life.
During her interview, Kolanović says, “[P]recisely because of their resemblance, dolls also have this eeriness about them, as though we’re not entirely in control after all.” In her novel, the dolls take center stage while their owners retreat to the background, sometimes even disappearing altogether. In one scenario, Ana M.’s Ken and Dea’s Barbie are to marry in the basement while Dr. Kajfeš, the best man, tries his best to dissuade the latter and profess his love for her. But he also calls her a gold digger when she does not accept him. In another “scene,” Borna’s Skipper—not quite Barbie but a Mattel original marketed as her younger sister—has an unrequited love for Dr. Kajfeš, her physical education teacher at school. They have romantic trysts on a skiing trip with the entire class, meeting in secret. A third scenario has Dr. Kajfeš as a seedy, hard-boiled detective who is investigating suspicious activity in glitzy Barbie World. Elsewhere, Dea’s Barbie and Dr. Kajfeš are contesting elections against each other for the post of President. The stories are elaborate with background and even elements that connect across a larger narrative arc.
The ideal girl or the perfect woman, the acceptable expressions of masculinity, the role of capital and capitalist production—these are the many strands that come to the fore through the games the children play. All of it is much more than just imagination or creativity at work; it hints at a larger framework or structure that dominates life. Barbie World, in many ways, is a microcosm of the world outside. Yet, these narratives are subversive by not falling into the commonplace myth-making that is created by Mattel and fall outside sanctioned, marketed storylines. The children often make do for accessories, adopting other objects and dolls into their gameplay that are otherwise not part of the glossy catalogues.
Occupied with play, the protagonist admits early on: “That war in Zagreb, when you grew used to it, wasn’t actually all that bad.” But the war is not as distant as the kids would like it to be. The novel works as satire in the way it obliquely comments on the nation state and its origin even as it refracts real-life events occurring outside of these bubbles. Kolanović admits, “[Y]ou could never totally escape, not even through Barbie play, so in my stories the wartime reality keeps returning like a boomerang to the glamorous, bright-pink world of Barbies.” The games are constantly interrupted. Ana P.’s brother arrives to announce the fall of Vukovar—“After that sentence. Even our little Barbie horror show no longer made sense”—and advancing forces. Another time, refugee children arriving in Zagreb also come with their bits and bobs—a peasant woman in a traditional outfit, a He-Man and a Skeletor, two Bauer Lego men, a bald baby—to join the resident children in their games. Elsewhere, in the story where Dr. Kajfeš is a detective, the newspaper he reads has real-world headlines.
The end of the war also signals an end to friendships and Barbies. While the conflict goes on, all the children grow up and out of dolls, many even moving out of the building. The protagonist resists the pull of the world outside the longest. All the dolls are handed down, donated, misplaced, or abandoned: “Barbie World was imploding, and my Barbie possessions were irrevocably drifting farther and farther from reach. . . . Off they went, one by one, my Barbies, and somehow parallel with them, everyone else.” The novel’s final chapter, fittingly titled “Farewell, Barbie!,” takes on a sombre, poignant tone. The protagonist is also deeply concerned by the fate of Dr. Kajfeš, although he was not hers, and wonders where he might have ended up, choosing to imagine a happy ending for him.
In an essay for Reading in Translation published in 2019, Ena Selimović explored the as-yet-untranslated Sloboština Barbie, deeming it an “energetic and ambivalent text . . . which subtly wonders how childhood itself can be protected in times of war.” Selimović is one of the co-founders of Turkoslavia, a collective of translators working from Turkic and/or Slavic languages, and herself works from BCMS (Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian). She wrote the piece to highlight why the book should be translated into English. Now, more than five years later in 2025, she has done the job herself. It is hard to believe that this is her debut full-length translation. As someone who recently translated a story with a child protagonist, I know how hard it is to maintain that voice across languages, and there is a real risk of it mutating into something else. Selimović has brilliantly rendered the wonder, the mix of naive innocence with worldly wisdom, in this fabulous translation. Underground Barbie uses an ingenious premise to communicate the horror and gravity of war.
Areeb Ahmad (he/they) is a Delhi-based writer, critic, and translator who loves to champion indie presses and experimental books. He has served as an Editor-at-Large for India at Asymptote and a Books Editor at Inklette Magazine. Their writing and translations have appeared in Gulmohur Quarterly, Sontag Mag, The Bombay Literary Magazine, The Hooghly Review, MAYDAY, and elsewhere. Their reviews and essays have been published in Scroll.in, The Caravan, Business Standard, Hindustan Times, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. He is @Bankrupt_Bookworm on Instagram and @Broke_Bookworm on Twitter.
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